New link: Notes on Truffaut's 'The Wild Child' for Senses of Cinema

The director caught between society and freedom, mentor and child, from Issue 86, March of this year.

Book Excerpt: 'The Moment of Shock: 'Psycho' and 'Peeping Tom''

A frame from the (in)famous shower sequence in Hitchcock's Psycho.

The following excerpt comes from my recently completed manuscript: Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film. 

1960 was a pivotal year for film horror. No fewer than four groundbreaking movies — Britain’s Peeping Tom, America’s Psycho, Japan’s Jigoku, and Italy’s Black Sunday — were released, each of them seismically disturbing to censors and audiences alike, and all deeply frightening in a completely new way. (The last two films mentioned inaugurated their own national horror cycles, to be discussed later.)

European and Asian film industries gained massive amounts of ground in the 1950s. As nations rebuilt themselves after World War II, they found America ready and willing to absorb their cultural products. Soon lumped in with more serious foreign “arthouse films,” genre pictures from around the world played in America — and made money. Then, when Britain’s Hammer Studios succeeded by reviving the classic movie monsters, it emboldened other European, Asian, and American film studios to leap hard into the genre.

There were few harbingers, especially in England and Europe, of the creative boom to come. There weren’t many non-sci-fi-oriented horror films being made on the Continent. Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film, Vampyr (1932), was a notable exception, a dreamy, avant-garde affair that has much more to do with Cocteau than Caligari.

There were films based on ghost stories and eerie fables, or hoary, gory “blood and thunder” melodramas such as the popular series made by British actor/theatrical impresario Tod Slaughter (Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street) between 1935 and 1948. Horror anthology films were as old as Richard Oswald’s Uncanny Tales of 1919, but the Ealing Studios’ 1945 production of Dead of Night brought that subgenre back with a roar. Other films, such as Mizoguchi’s 1953 Ugetsu, contain moments of genuine horror but are not horror films as such.

Japan’s biggest, and tallest, contribution to the horror-monster genre was Godzilla, who debuted in 1954. His creation was inspired by the financial success of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms two years earlier. Godzilla, a giant prehistoric sea monster revived by nuclear testing, was angry, unpredictable, and violent, a colossally destructive embodiment of the atomic terrors endured by Japan during World War II. His immediate popularity triggered a domino-fall of sequels, an entire subgenre (tokusatsu, or live-action special-effects-laden fantasy, sci-fi, and horror films), and within that, further division into kaiju (giant monster) and kaijin (humanoid supervillain) movies.

 Studios such as Toho (also the home studio of Akira Kurosawa — Godzilla opened the same year as The Seven Samurai), Tsuburaya (home of superhero Ultraman), P Productions, and Toei created highly successful film and TV franchises based on kaiju and kaijin. By Godzilla’s fifth appearance, he had begun the slow transition from mindless force of destruction to rogue champion of those in distress, and eventually to the status of national symbol and mascot.

A new feeling was slowly developing across national cinemas, edgy and disturbing. Actor Charles Laughton’s single directorial effort, 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, though classified as a thriller, is one of the scariest and most subversive movies ever made. It’s a dark, Expressionistic children’s nightmare, a cautionary tale with mythic overtones. Legendary film critic James Agee’s script, one of only four he wrote, is masterful. A serial-killer preacher stalks two children in a quest for stolen money. In the process, every social institution and position of trust is brought into question or turned inside out. Robert Mitchum plays one of his signature roles, the preacher who is also a serial killer, stalking two young children in his search for stolen loot. It combines a strange, silent-era dreaminess with a scathing portrayal of hypocritical evil.

Robert Mitchum as evil incarnate in The Night of the Hunter -- LOVE tattooed on one set of knuckles, HATE on the other.

 Georges-Henri Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, also made in 1955, was a game-changer. The story of a wife and mistress who combine forces to kill the abusive man who rules over them was adapted from a popular 1951 murder mystery by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, whose work would be adapted into other memorable films such as Vertigo and Eyes Without a Face. In a way, Diaboliques was a throwback to the “old dark house” mystery/horror films of the 1920s. However, it differs from everything that came before it in three key ways.

First, the plot. Diaboliques was among the first films to implore its audience (with a final title card) not to reveal its twist ending. The film is constructed as one long buildup to a traumatic payoff, which calls into question everything the viewer has seen and believed. It pulls the rug out from under its audience, assaulting its sense of logic and continuity. Clouzot’s twisty mystery founded the cinema of shock — an entire movie constructed to provide a disturbing payoff at the end.

Vera Clouzot faces the unfaceable in Les Diaboliques.

 Second is Clouzot’s emphasis on the subjective experience of the film’s central figure, its guilty protagonist, the wife Christina. Played by Vera Clouzot, the director’s wife, the film is shot from her perspective. The gloomy, banal setting of a Gradgrindian boys’ school, the film’s dank, sodden, and moldy atmosphere, and the fragmented and shadowed interiors, evoke the unexpressed feelings that ferment underneath as the principals attempt not to panic. Clouzot again and again concentrates on small details and atmospheric touches, and on pauses that linger just a shade too long, using every filmic tool at his disposal to create a sense of impending and inescapable doom.

Third and most important is the unrepentantly dim view of humanity that Diaboliques embodies. There is a despair in the film about the inherent selfishness of human motivation akin to that found in the film noirs of the day, but Clouzot goes deeper. His past provides clues for his attitude. Clouzot started out translating German films into French, but was fired by his German studio for his friendship with Jewish producers. Later, he worked for a German film company in France during World War II and was then condemned afterwards, and for a time blacklisted, as a German collaborator.

In Diaboliques, all actions seem pointless seem destined to frustration. Emotions are irrelevant in the struggle for domination. No one is safe or worthy of trust, and paranoia rules the day. Instead of an attack from without, Clouzot gives us the horror from within, made manifest in the scope of the daily lives and petty ambitions of “normal” people.

The result is filmmaking as primal shock, a thrill ride. Crowds flocked to the film, and it encouraged many repeat viewers, who were eager to see just how the film had tricked them the first time. Now film was a blatant tool of manipulation and assault. From now on, triggering a visceral response, not simply an emotional one, was an essential component of film horror.

The stage was set for the psychological-thriller boom. Fifty years after Freud’s theories emerged, abnormal and dangerous mental states were cropping up in film, presaged by movies such as Night Must Fall (1937), Gaslight (1940), The Leopard Man (1943), and The Scarlet Claw, The Spiral Staircase, and Leave Her to Heaven (all 1946). Alfred Hitchcock made suspense, mystery and unease his stock in trade for decades — and in 1960 he made the most influential and graphic horror film in history.

Psycho is the quintessential transgressive film. In it, a lonely hotel houses a shy young man and his murderous mother. It mixed sex, madness and violence so effectively that it became Hitchcock’s most successful movie. In response, the shock-laden exploitation film market exploded.

Psycho was a low-budget affair, disdained by Hitchcock’s studio Paramount as too perverse a script to film. As a result, Hitchcock produced it himself and made millions. Based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, which was in turn based on the real-life career of American serial killer Ed Gein, Psycho put sex, sexuality, mental illness, and (seemingly) graphic violence front and center.

To boot, it gave viewers protagonists that vanished abruptly, and encouraged identification with the villain, himself a victim. Like Clouzot’s climactic scene in Diaboliques, Psycho’s infamous, complexly edited “shower scene” hit the viewing audience in the collective unconscious — a more perfect staging of fatal helplessness is hard to imagine. Hitchcock took the “don’t reveal the ending” gimmick and pushed it hard — forcing exhibitors to refuse to seat viewers after the film started, with promotional, life-sized cardboard cutouts of the director pointing at his watch in every theater lobby that showed the film.

Hitchcock doubled down on Clouzot’s cynicism. The victims in the film are random, and the crimes depicted are discovered and stopped almost by chance. The audience’s desire to see the innocent saved and the guilty punished is repeatedly frustrated — in fact, there is no culpable “guilty party” left by the end of the film, and no sense of a happy ending — the only resolution being found in the final image of a car and the body it contains being pulled out of a swamp.

Hitchcock’s effortless technique, developed by decades of experience, made Psycho a hit, cementing his status as a master filmmaker. Conversely, the experienced, brilliant, and honored British director Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, made the same year, destroyed his career. Both featured mentally ill serial killers motivated by voyeurism and sexual excitement. Why was the reaction to Peeping Tom so different?

Peeping Tom is the embodiment of Terence Fisher’s definition of a horror movie as an adult fairy tale. It’s a visual poem about sex and death, created by Powell, best known for his work with writer/producer Emeric Pressburger (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes). Powell took a script by polymath and cryptographer Leo Marks and turned it into a transgressive masterpiece.

In it, a young cameraman, Mark Lewis, turns out to have been observed and tormented by his psychologist father his entire life, examined and documented relentlessly for a study of fear. Mark works as a focus puller by day at a low-budget movie studio making silly comedies, and supplements his income by taking and selling pornographic pictures. He lives in one room of his father’s mansion, renting out the other rooms and keeping to himself. In his spare time, Mark films women as he kills them, capturing their fear-soaked reactions to their own death as they see it in a mirror attached to the camera.

He earns the affection of a lodger, Helen, who gradually discovers his secret. Mark is a pitiable figure, a tragic antihero who is aware of his compulsions but is unable to break away from them. His camera is always with him; he even films the investigation of his crimes. As played by Carl Boehm, he is Peter Lorre-like, quiet and thick-lidded, almost whispering his lines, as invisible as he can make himself. (We never see Mark in the act, as it were — he is perpetually placid.)

Helen, played by Anna Massey, is a “Plain Jane.” Excluded as an object of desire and therefore as a potential murder target, only she has the power to divert Mark from his obsessions even temporarily. She becomes his confessor, and he shields her from his violence as best he can — “Don’t let me see you are frightened,” he implores her. For Mark, fear is the only palpable emotion, the only thing that can excite him sexually, and what provokes him to guiltily kill the object of his sexual impulse.

Peeping Tom's climax.

 When Psycho ends, evil is captured (if not yet brought to justice) and the return of normality is implied. Peeping Tom goes much deeper, equating image-making with death. Taking a woman’s picture turns her into an object to be used, for sexual gratification, or Mark’s substitute for sexual gratification, which is playing the films of his kills over again. “Whatever I photograph I always lose,” he says. In the end, Mark kills himself in an elaborate set-up, recording his own fear as he runs himself thorough on the blade attached to his camera, ironically completing the study his father began. “I’m afraid, and I’m glad I’m afraid,” he cries.

And what does it mean that we’re peering over Mark’s shoulder through the film? The audience came to see violence, too. What is the extent and nature of the audience’s complicity with the horror-makers, and, finally, the monsters themselves? Norman Bates’ brand of madness is easier to digest than Mark Lewis’, it lets you off the hook. 

Peeping Tom uses the device of the bold heroine who sees through a monster’s disguise, which comes straight out of Beauty and the Beast. Helen is at least physically intact at movie’s end, the original “final girl” in horror film who survives not due to a man’s rescue but due to her own intelligence and guts. It’s a character that would get lost for decades. Horror’s misogyny was about to increase exponentially.

From my archives: 'David Lean directs Noel Coward'

“I loved its follies and apathies and curious streaks of genius,” wrote Noel Coward of his decision to return to England when World War II began. Had he not, the rise of David Lean would not have been deterred, but it may not have been as swift or as assured.

Coward provided Lean with writing that was strong and well-structured; Lean, as an already accomplished editor, knew how film worked. He could eliminate the extraneous. He had a keen sense of how to breathe cinematic life into a flat concept or character. Lean serves the material; later he will serve himself, with ever-more preposterous results.

Their mutually beneficial relationship is captured definitively in Criterion’s new box set. The first film in the series, the breathtaking World War II propaganda film In Which We Serve, was written for the screen; the next three – This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, and Brief Encounter, are stage-derived. Lean solves the problems put to him in two out of three cases by the plastic limitations of the material, at best with Encounter, but to middling effect in Breed -- and comes up empty in Spirit.

When the war began, Coward was in a unique and ambivalent position. A tremendously popular entertainer, he was a prolific songwriter and playwright with a reputation as an effete, cutting drawing-room wit whose undeclared but obvious homosexuality both amused and repelled England’s middle class. Coward had written his grand stage chronicles of English life, Cavalcade and This Happy Breed; his patriotism was showing. He volunteered for the war effort in numerous ways, and In Which We Serve was the grandest of these, earning Coward an honorary Oscar and an air of unassailable legitimacy.

Based on the exploits of Coward’s friend Lord Mountbatten early in the war, the naval saga In Which We Serve is a perfectly pitched paean to the fighting spirit. In this case, it is delineated not by violence and victories, but by patience and fortitude in the face of what were at the time seemingly impossible odds. In this film, Britain’s classes are exemplified, and barriers between them are tacitly overcome as all bond together in unity, modesty, understated humor, and stiff-upper-lip stoicism.

Noel Coward and crew, rescued in In Which We Serve

 Coward, in particular, was making a huge gamble. His insistence on making it “his” project included casting himself as the brave Captain Kinross, master of the destroyer Torrin. Coward’s portrayal of a noble, unaffected, and incredibly straight naval officer was probably his greatest performance. Coward’s Kinross is absolutely calm, repressed to the point of being wooden; an apt critique of the heterosexual male stereotype in performance. (Later, Coward would overhear criticism of his performance from a neighboring table at a restaurant. As he left, he flounced over the offenders, put his hands on his hips, and hissed, “Well, I thought I was VERY GOOD!”)

Coward knew he needed top help to realize his project. He selected talents such as future Oscar winners and nominees Lean, producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, cinematographer Ronald Neame, and camera operator Guy Green. Likewise, his casting initiated long-term relationships between Coward and Lean and actors such as Bernard Miles, John Mills, Kay Walsh, Joyce Carey, Celia Johnson, and Richard Attenborough.

Neame’s inky shadows and sharp highlights lend depth and dimension to the combat scenes, a nourish contrast to the traditionally lit domestic and flashback scenes. This high-contrast look will maintain itself in all succeeding black-and-white Lean films.

Lean, known already as the best film editor in England, now showed his organizational and leadership capabilities. Although he was a notoriously bad hand at drawing, he resolutely storyboarded the action -- and annotated his shooting script to within an inch of its life before hitting the soundstage. “All the important imaginative thinking, he (Lean) maintained, had to be done before the shooting commenced; there was no time for lengthy improvisations on the set when a director was working with numerous actors and technicians.” (1) This thoroughness and discipline served him well in future; his stone-faced seriousness on set would later lead to rifts with more easygoing colleagues such as Trevor Howard and Robert Mitchum.

Lean began production on In Which We Serve as a glorified assistant director; however, Coward wearied of the time-consuming, technical rigors of film direction and turned over the helm entirely to Lean after a few weeks. Even in his first effort, some of Lean’s trademarks -- confident pacing, deep-focus shots, and close attention to the human face -- are evident. “. . . .the fact that Lean was able to stamp his personal style upon a production overshadowed by Coward’s looming (and egotistical) presence says much for his ability.” (2)

Overcoming a initial lack of support and cooperation from the British military with an intervention from King George VI himself, Coward and Lean’s film wound up on release to be quite literally a rousing success, serving as a template for the stiff-upper-lip heroics of war films to come. The fruitful association continued.

This Happy Breed was a sentimental, historical stage epic in the style of Coward’s previous Cavalcade of 1931 (that show initiated the cliché in which a loving shipboard couple wanders away from in front of a life preserver . . . labeled “H.M.S. Titanic”!). Where Cavalcade profiled the upper crust, Breed looks warmly, if condescendingly, at the working class.

Robert Newton and Celia Johnson in This Happy Breed

It’s another tribute to the spirit of embattled England, studded with heartaches and happiness, rendered in a deliberately dull Technicolor palette to more accurately reflect the dingy reality of plebian life. It’s an uneven if deeply felt panorama that fails to engage.

“ . . .he took every mundane event the cinema avoided – washing up, drying clothes, a great many meals – and worked the dialogue into them. For a British film to do this was unusual enough, but to show the kitchen sink, albeit in muted Technicolor, was revolutionary.” (3) This, along with a not-so-obscure moralizing about the comeuppance of those who don’t know how to “keep their place” oddly presages the conventions of British “kitchen-sink” social realism that were to flower 12 years later with John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger.

Blithe Spirit, a farce about ghosts and fidelity, initially hailed as a masterful work, has not stood the test of time. Its brittle drawing-room sauciness is a return to form for Coward, and it had a long and happy run on stage in London. However, in Lean’s hands, the jokes fall flat – male lead Rex Harrison waspishly declared years later that it’s useful to make a comedy with a director who knows what’s funny. It is known best watched for its Oscar-winning special effects and Margaret Rutherford’s definitive performance as the batty medium Madame Arcati.

Kay Hammond as whimsical ghost Elvira and Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit

Lean and Coward’s final collaboration, Brief Encounter, equals In Which We Serve in quality and significance. A third adaptation of a Coward stage work, it tells the story of two married people who meet by chance in a railway station, fall in love, realize that an affair would destroy them both, and part.

It’s a fever-dream, stream-of-consciousness visual poem punctuated with the heavy thuds of “realities” to be faced up to bravely. Our narrator and protagonist, Laura (Celia Johnson is absolutely perfect as the clipped, overwrought, unconventionally ravishing heroine) feels so keenly the lost chance that Alec (Trevor Howard as a noble young doctor) represents that she contemplates throwing herself under a train a la Karenina in the penultimate scene.

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter

 As is the case in almost every subsequent Lean film, the willing spirit is chained by the weak flesh, the social imperative. Wild, nonconformist impulses threaten the blasé normality from which they sprung and are snuffed out ruthlessly. Tellingly, Lean is quoted as saying: “I am drawn to the person who refuses to face defeat even when they realize that their most cherished expectations may go unfulfilled.” (4)

Like Rosy Ryan in Ryan’s Daughter, Zhivago, Lawrence, and Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Laura is swept out of and above mundane reality by her passionate obsession, but is flung to earth. In the end she does the right thing – and crushes out her soul like a cigarette butt.

Coward and Lean both moved on to reach iconic heights – Coward as a sort of aging roué, and Lean as the eminence grise of cinema, for better and worse. To watch these four films in chronological order is to see Lean grow from a contractor to a fully assured artist who is ready to do what he needs to make his vision come to life.

1. “Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean,” Gene D. Phillips, pg. 55.
2. “Noel Coward: A Biography,” Philip Hoare, pg. 328.
3. “David Lean: A Biography,” Kevin Brownlow, pg. 181.
4. Phillips, pg. 96

DAVID LEAN DIRECTS NOEL COWARD

Including:

In Which We Serve (1942)

This Happy Breed (1944)

Blithe Spirit (1945)

Brief Encounter (1945)

In Which We Serve (1942)

Britain

Director Noel Coward, David Lean

Screenplay Noel Coward

Producer Noel Coward

Director of Photography Ronald Neame

Art Director David Rawnsley

With Noel Coward (Capt. E.V. Kinross, R.N.), Bernard Miles (Chief Petty Officer Hardy), John Mills (Ordinary Seaman ‘Shorty’ Blake), Celia Johnson (Mrs. Kinross), Joyce Carey (Mrs. Hardy), Kay Walsh (Freda Lewis), James Donald (Doc), Derek Elphinstone (Number 1), Michael Wilding (Flags), Robert Sansom (Guns), Philip Friend (Torps), Richard Attenborough (Young Powder Handler – uncredited)

Runtime 114 minutes

This Happy Breed (1944)

Britain

Director David Lean

Screenplay Noel Coward (uncredited), Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald Neame

Producer Noel Coward, Ronald Neame (Neame uncredited)

Director of Photography Ronald Neame

Art Director C.P. Norman

With Robert Newton (Frank Gibbons), Celia Johnson (Ethel Gibbons), Reg (John Blythe), Vi (Eileen Erskine), Kay Walsh (Queenie), Stanley Holloway (Bob Mitchell), John Mills (Billy Mitchell), Amy Veness (Mrs. Flint), Alison Leggatt (Aunt Sylvia)

Runtime 111 minutes

Blithe Spirit (1945)

Britain

Director David Lean

Screenplay David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Noel Coward (Coward uncredited)

Producer Noel Coward

Director of Photography Ronald Neame

Art Director C.P. Norman

Costumes Rahvis (dresses only)

With Rex Harrison (Charles Condomine), Constance Cummings (Ruth), Kay Hammond (Elvira), Margaret Rutherford (Madame Arcati), Jacqueline Clarke (Edith)

Runtime 96 minutes

Brief Encounter (1945)

Britain

Director David Lean

Screenplay Noel Coward, Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald Neame (latter three uncredited)

Producer Noel Coward, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Ronald Neame (latter two uncredited)

Director of Photography Robert Krasker

Art Director Lawrence P. Williams (as L.P. Williams)

With Celia Johnson (Laura Jesson), Trevor Howard (Dr. Alec Harvey), Cyril Raymond (Fred Jesson), Stanley Holloway (Albert Godby), Joyce Carey (Myrtle Bagot)

Runtime 86 minutes

DVD

USA, 2012

Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1)

Aspect Ratio 1:37:1

Sound Mix Mono

Extras New high-definition digital transfers of the BFI National Archives’ 2008 restorations. Audio commentary on Brief Encounter by film historian Bruce Eder. Interviews with Coward scholar Barry Day on all four films. Interview with Ronald Neame, short documentaries on the making of In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter, TV documentary David Lean: A Self Portrait (1971), 1992 episode of The Southbank Show on the life and career of Coward, 1969 audio recording of conversation between Coward and Attenborough, trailers, 46-page booklet with essays by Ian Christie, Terrence Rafferty, Farran Smith Nehme, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Kevin Brownlow.